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Monday, 19 March 2018

Racists and Anti-Semites hijack an Anti-Racist Rally.

On March 17 a rally took place in Glasgow organized by the ‘Stand
up to Racism’ group supposedly protest all forms of racism including
Anti-Semitism, but the hate of the streets of Glasgow on a cold Scottish Saturday
was palpable.

The shocking thing was that vicious racists insults,
provocations, and minor violence took place during an anti-racism,
anti-Semitism, rally, and the main targets and victims of this hate were
Scottish Christians and Jews, and an Israeli Christian, Mohammad Kabiya, an
Israeli Muslim, and Lorena Khattib, an attractive Israel Druze girl representing
Israeli minorities who happened to be in Scotland as delegates of an Israeli organization,
Reservists on Duty, who were in Scotland as guests of COFIS, the Coalition of
Friends of Israel Scotland.

The provocations were led by the infamous Scottish Palestine
Solidarity Campaign and the far-left Red Front Republic fringe group who marched
under the Communist Hammer and Sickle banner. Chanting ‘From the River to the
Sea, Palestine will be free,’ a dog whistle for a world without the Jewish
State, and an affront to the raison d’etre of the rally, they forced the
Israeli participants to be isolated from the parade and to suffer indignities
from these provocateurs.

Nigel Goodrich, the COFIS convener, said, “the racists of
the BDS campaign basically controlled the streets during this rally.” The police, in their effort to ensure disruptions
and violence were minimized, were complaint in allowing the Israeli delegation
to be detached from the main body of the rally.

Clashes occurred and, as Jonathan Elkhouri, an ex-Lebanese
Christian whose family had to escape death threats from Hezbollah and are now living
as Israelis in Haifa, told me, “we were called ‘child murderers,’ ‘racists,’ ‘fascists,’
and accused of ‘killing children.’ When we tried to reason with the haters and
tell them who we are and what we represent, they shoved us and tried take down
our banners and flags.”

Another chant heard at this anti-racism rally was “From
Glasgow to Gaza. Intifada!” Intifada to
Israelis is a pseudonym for terrorism. This, at an anti-hate rally on the
streets of Scotland in March 2017.

Micheline Brannan, the chairperson of the Scottish Council
of Jewish Communities, complained to The Herald newspaper that the anti-racism
message was hijacked and perverted by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign
and the Antifa haters who forced a provocative confrontation with local
Christians and Jews and also members of Israel’s minority population in an
effort to stop them participating in the rally.

The political drive of Arab nations, having failed to eliminate the Jewish state by wars, attempted to isolate Israel diplomatically by branding it, in 1975, with the horrible aspersion of being a racist and, by implication, a pariah state that must be outlawed and isolated. It took seventeen years to remove that stain from the annals of the UN. At that
time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the great American diplomat, announced from the
podium of the United Nations General Assembly that “Whatever else Zionism may be,
it is not, nor can it be a form of racism."

Israel has assembled a commonwealth of brown, black, white
Jews from around the world. It gives equal rights and protection to Christians,
Muslims, Druze, Bedouin, Circassian, Aramean citizens and the Bahai faith.
These minorities have reached the highest ranks within Israeli civil society.

Just like anti-Semitism never dies, the anti-Jewish state
hate was seen in 2001 at Durban, South Africa, at a UN World Conference on
Racism, where over a thousand hateful NGOs picked on Israel to resurrect the ‘Zionism
in Racism’ lie.

Today we see on campuses and on the streets of cities such
as Glasgow the same abhorrent claims against the Jewish state being fed to the
uninitiated by radical left-wing rabble rousers and intellectual haters. In
Glasgow, the radical intolerant haters chose a setting that was supposed to
highlight real racism and anti-Semitism to hijack the event and, in an alarming
and blatantly anti-Semitic display, exclusively targeted the only Jewish state in
the world, and a handful of its supporters, for malevolent abuse.

It is to be hoped that the authorities in Scotland have
identified the provocateurs in advance of future events that attempt to promote
the message of tolerance and truth and that, next time, it will be the haters
and the confrontational radicals that are isolated and cordoned off, and not
those who come with a positive message of hope.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy
at the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies.

He is the author of the book, ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS, and
Anti-Semitism.’